Promising fruitful post “Heritage and Modernity” Participation
The Egyptian Contemporary Music Ensemble has made it to the international Gaudeamus Muzeikweek with five contemporary works carrying different falcons and messages to it but agreeing on the importance of the collision between the western and western cultures through music. the Dialogue between cultures started in Cairo long ago in Cairo with the European Egyptian Contemporary Music Society’s serious endeavours that started with small meetings between European contemporary composers and local Oud players.
That later has developed into a bigger frame to include about 40 composers, musicologists, music critics and artists from about 20 different countries all around the world who cam to Cairo in April for a four-day forum entitles “Heritage and Modernity”. The forum has debated issues of expression of identity in Music and themes of modernism, post-modernism and contemporaneity in the East and the West and the different manifestations of such concepts in contemporary music.

ECME at Gaudeamus
The ensemble as mentioned before is presenting 5 different contemporary works for prominent composers such as Bahaa al Ansary (Egypt), Zaid Jabri (Syria/Poland), Wilbert Bulsink (The Netherlands), Bart De Vrees (The Netherlands) and Last but not least the national poet of the Netherlands in 2014 Willem Jeths. Most of these works try to bring a cultural element and theme of special to its composer, so we may see different shades of each composer that distinguish his musical language from the other. For example, Zaid Jabri, brings his very own percepion of the tranquil but vigorous Aegean sea and its waves in his composition “Fluctus” while Bahaa el Ansary brings the Eternity of the Nile to the dutch audience. According to Bulsink his experience will be more on “combining different polyphonic techniques from the medieval and renaissance Europe with middle-eastern maqams and quarter tones”.

Such experimentation has been tried practically in Cairo in the concert “Caprice” within the course of the “Heritage and Modernity” Forum in which Jabri and Bulsink have took part and introduced works to audience in Cairo featuring these such new concepts that will be taken further and to different audience in September’s concert.

This participation comes in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, the Foreign Cultural Relations Sector, the Dutch Embassy in Cairo, the Allianz Culture Foundation- Heritage and Modernity and the Gaudeamusmusiekweek